As the Zionist Union is outpolling Netanyahu’s coalition of Republican inspired conservatives and religious Israeli Jews allied with American evangelicals, party leaders lay opposing Netayahu outline their economic and social agenda as Israelis, like Americans are faced with a widening wealth gap and terrible decline in the nation’s education levels.
By Omri Zerachovitz and Ora Coren | Mar. 12, 2015 | 10:30 AM
The timing of the TheMarker’s annual finance conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, less than a week before Tuesday’s Knesset election, inevitably made it a forum at which several party leaders laid out their positions on economic and social issues. Leaders of three of the parties participated: Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog; Naftali Bennett, the current economy minister, who heads the Habayit Hayehudi party; and Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud minister who now heads the Kulanu party.
Herzog promised his audience that if he is elected prime minister, he intends to pass an economic program within his first 100 days in office that would cost 7 billion shekels ($1.75 billion) over two years. He said 2.5 billion shekels in financing for his economic program would come from scrapping Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s much-vaunted plan to exempt qualifying buyers of newly built homes from the 18% value-added tax, a plan that has yet to pass into law. READMORE at HAARETZ